ITLC Corner: Big Data, IoT Poised to Transform Trucking
This story appears in the May 9 print edition of iTECH, a supplement to Transport Topics.
It might astound you to realize that Apple’s iPhone has only been around for eight years. In that time, it has revolutionized not just the market for mobile devices, but also the very manner in which people consume information. The question of what — if anything — could bring that level of technological change to the trucking industry in the same period of time was recently posed to a group of industry insiders, and the results may not be what you expect.
“The transportation industry leaders eight years from now will be the ones who jumped at the opportunity now to combine industry savvy and disruptive technologies — especially ‘Internet of Things’ and ‘Big Data,’ ” said the authors of a Princeton Consultants study titled “Digital Disruption in Freight Transportation — The Next 8 Years.”
Joe HowardSteve Sashihara, the consulting firm’s CEO, said the eight-year timeframe was chosen to coincide with the eighth anniversary of the iPhone.
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“It was hard for many of us — particularly for a lot of us in technology — to believe that it’s only been eight years since the iPhone had come out,” he said during a webinar hosted by Stifel Nicolaus analyst John Larkin to explore the survey’s findings. “If you can recall back to when the first iPhone came out, they weren’t the first people to come out with … a smartphone. But somehow, like a switch going off, Apple changed the world.”
The purpose of the survey, Sashihara said, was to identify technologies that could have an effect on trucking similar to the iPhone’s for personal computing. He asked what technologies are “kicking around right now, maybe in a raw form,” that eight years from now will make us say that the whole world has changed.
According to survey respondents, Big Data — defined in the survey as “massive unstructured external data to drive decision-making” — is the most likely answer; it was viewed by 90% of participants as the disruptor poised to have the greatest impact. That was followed closely by 86% for the Internet of Things, which describes the increasing interconnectedness of devices, data, companies and consumers by real-time sensors and transfer of information.
“Big Data and the Internet of Things are already here,” Sashihara said. “Most of us probably have more data than we are using or even know. Let’s start using it now. And we’re not just talking about internal data from our own machines, but the world of external data out there that is being used by forward-looking people — particularly people in the financial services industry, the finance community, the investment community — to try to understand market trends, competitive moves, and use that to inform how we are making our decisions.”
Much further down the list for drivers of change in trucking are Uber-type delivery services and self-driving trucks.
While the notion of adapting the business model of the popular ridesharing service to hauling freight is a buzz-worthy subject, just 17% of respondents believed this kind of service will have a “large” effect on the industry.
“The exciting thing that Uber has done is gotten people in our industry, which — let’s face it, has been fairly slow to adopt technology — [to think] more entrepreneurially,” he said. “New ways of matching spare capacity and surge and seasonal demand is compelling [to] both the buyers and the sellers. That’s a market wanting to happen. It will either be the start-ups, or the blue-chips today, or somewhere in between.”
Despite survey respondents’ skepticism, Princeton Consultants sees several areas where opportunity exists. Among them are same-day and shorthaul moves to maximize excess capacity; broader reach for brokers and third-party logistics providers to share information with all parties, including shippers, carriers and drivers; and a push to drive adoption of application program interfaces as a replacement for the electronic data interchange technology that is entrenched in the industry.
One technology that many still question is self-driving vehicles — at least in the near term. Just 5% of respondents said they see it having a large impact during the next eight years, with 23% foreseeing a “moderate” impact.
For its part, Princeton Consultants believes self-driving trucks are “close to inevitable” but forecasts that they will roll out over time in three phases. First will be truck autopilot services, with drivers still onboard. That will be followed by “select driverless,” with linehaul on specific lanes and roads during specified times, and possibly at private facilities. The last phase will be large-scale driverless, but the firm doesn’t foresee this happening until the public is convinced that the technology is safe. Sashihara believes there will be a clear turning point for that moment.
“When people start saying that self-driving trucks are actually safer than human-operated trucks, then you will actually see a rush toward the third phase,” he said. “In fact, you might have people insisting on it.”
Plus, there is a business case for commercial fleets in terms of how self-piloted trucks would be spec’d and operated, Sashihara said.
“If you think of a sleeper cab — that is a very heavy vehicle. It is expensive, designed to provide comfort and to protect the driver, and has a lot of power. If you had a device that is designed to be robotically driven — maybe on that second generation — you could really save a lot of steel [and] a lot of diesel,” he said.
Sashihara also noted that experiments with platooning trucks have revealed up to 15% gains in fuel efficiency.
“Just by putting the trucks close enough together — but not in a way you could put trucks on the road today — you get what almost looks like an intermodal train,” he said.
Joe Howard, information manager for ITLC, is a former editor at Transport Topics. He can be reached at jhoward@trucking.org.
